"Thank you. Are the Marines away?"
"Yes, Ma'am. And Commander Suchon. Lieutenant Montoya came aboard an hour ago."
She did look up at that, and her stony face flared with a brief but real smile as she saw the amusement in McKeon's eyes. Then the smile faded, and she bent back to her maneuvering display.
"We'll be going in pursuit of Sirius, Mr. McKeon. It's imperative that we stop her from leaving the system. What's her current heading?"
"She's steadied down on two-seven-four by zero-niner-three true from the primary, Captain," Lieutenant Brigham's crisp voice replied for the exec.
"What's out there, Mercedes?"
"At her current heading and acceleration she'll hit the hyper wall about one light-minute this side of the Tellerman wave, Captain," Brigham said after a moment, and Honor swallowed a silent curse. She'd been afraid of something like that.
"Impellers in three minutes, Ma'am," McKeon reported.
"Mr. Webster!"
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"Stand by to record a signal to Lieutenant Venizelos at Basilisk Control for immediate relay to Fleet HQ. Fleet scramble, no encryption. Priority One."
Heads turned, and Webster's swallow was clearly audible.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by to record."
"'Mr. Venizelos, you will commandeer the first available Junction carrier to relay the following message to Fleet HQ. Message begins: Authentication code Lima-Mike-Echo-Niner-Seven-One. Case Zulu. I say again, Zulu, Zulu, Zulu. Message ends.'" She heard McKeon suck air between his teeth at her shoulder. "That is all, Mr. Webster," she said softly. "You may transmit at will." Webster said absolutely nothing for an instant, but when he replied, his voice was unnaturally steady.
"Aye, aye, Captain. Transmitting Case Zulu." There was another brief pause, then, "Case Zulu transmitted, Ma'am."
"Thank you." Honor wanted to lean back and draw a deep breath, but there was no time. The message she'd just ordered Webster to send and Venizelos to relay to Manticore was never sent in drills, not even in the most intense or realistic Fleet maneuvers. Case Zulu had one meaning, and one only: "Invasion Imminent."
"Captain, are you sure—?" McKeon began, but her raised hand stopped him.
"Time to impellers, Exec?"
"Forty-three seconds."
"Thank you." She punched in the new estimate, a corner of her mind noting that Dominica Santos was shaving whole seconds off her original numbers. The time-to-execution display flickered to a new value, then resumed its steady downward march. "Chief Killian?"
"Aye, Captain?" The coxswain's shoulders were tight, but his voice was calm.
"Come to three-five-seven by one-seven-one, Chief Killian. On my command, I want three hundred gravities acceleration on that heading for ten seconds. Then come directly to two-seven-four by zero-niner-three true and go to maximum military power."
Stunned silence gripped the entire bridge, deeper even than that provoked by her Code Zulu, and then Chief Killian looked over his shoulder at her.
"Captain, that course—"
"I know precisely where that course will take us, Chief Killian," Honor said crisply.
"Captain—" it was Brigham this time, her voice very formal "—regulations require me to point out that you will be violating planetary traffic patterns on that course."
"Noted. Chief Braun—" Honor didn't even look up at the quartermaster, and her voice was almost absent "—please log the Sailing Master's warning and note that I assume full responsibility."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Braun's voice was absolutely toneless, but his expression was wary, as if he expected her to begin gibbering at any moment.
"Impeller wedge up and nominal, Ma'am," McKeon rasped, and Honor kept her eyes glued to her maneuvering display, watching the time display tick downward.
"Is that course laid in, Chief?"
"Ah, yes, Ma'am. Three-five-seven one-seven-one. Acceleration three-zero-zero gravities for one-zero seconds. Course change to two-seven-four zero-niner-three true also laid in, Captain."
"Thank you." Honor felt McKeon's tension at her shoulder, but there was no time to deal with that. "Courier boat time to impeller readiness?" she snapped.
"Thirty-six seconds, Ma'am," Lieutenant Cardones said in a small voice.
"Very well." She paused for just a beat, and then the timer hit zero. "Execute, Chief Killian!"
"Executing," the coxswain said in an almost prayerful voice, and HMS Fearless leapt instantly forward and "down" at an acceleration of just over twenty-nine hundred MPS2.
Honor's hands tightened on her chair's arms, but she didn't even blink as her eighty-eight-thousand-ton command screamed down into the very heart of Medusa's orbital traffic. She'd laid in that vector by eye, without the careful calculations and double-checking The Book required, but there was no time for that, and her mind was still in that odd overdrive. She knew it was correct, with an absolute certainty that admitted no doubt, and Fearless rode the invisible rail she'd nailed down in space as her speed mounted by almost three kilometers per second with every second that passed.
The Havenite courier boat loomed directly ahead of her on Honor's visual display, impeller nodes beginning to glow as they started to come up, but they weren't on line yet. Vapor spewed from the boat's emergency maneuvering thrusters as her skipper tried frantically to avoid Fearless's mad charge, yet those thrusters were far too weak to move the boat more than a few meters in the time they had, and the light cruiser stooped upon the eggshell courier like a vengeful falcon.
Breath hissed as her officers tensed for the inevitable, suicidal impact, but Honor's face was carved stone as the edge of Fearless's drive field slashed past the courier at less than two kilometers, far inside its drive safety perimeter. Vaporized alloy burst from the smaller vessel's stern as the cruiser's vastly more powerful impeller wedge blew her after nodes to incandescent gas; then Fearless was past, and the starscape slewed crazily in the visual display as she shot up and away from the planet in a mad skew turn and went instantly to full emergency power, accelerating at five hundred and twenty gravities.
"My God!" someone gasped as Fearless streaked past an orbiting four-million-ton freighter at a bare ten kilometers' separation. Honor didn't even turn her head. Her eyes were already reaching out for the scarlet light dot of the fleeing Sirius.
"Captain?" Webster sounded as shaken as anyone.
"Yes, Samuel?" Honor asked absently.
"Captain, I have an incoming message from that courier boat. They sound pretty upset, Ma'am."
"I imagine they do." Honor surprised herself with a grin and sensed the sudden release of her bridge crew's tension. "Put them on my screen."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Her screen lit with the image of a very young officer in the green and gray of the People's Navy. He wore a lieutenant's insignia, and his face was a curious, mottled blend of furious red and terrified white.
"Captain Harrington, I protest your reckless, illegal shiphandling!" the youngster shouted. "You almost destroyed my ship! Our entire after—"
"I'm very sorry, Captain," Honor interrupted in her most soothing tone. "I'm afraid I wasn't watching where I was going."
"Weren't watching wh—?!" The Havenite lieutenant strangled his exclamation and gritted his teeth. "I demand you heave to and assist my command in dealing with the damage you've inflicted!" he snarled instead.
"I regret that that's impossible, Captain," Honor said.
"Under the interstellar convention of—" the lieutenant began again, but she cut him off with a pleasant smile.
"I realize I'm technically in the wrong about this, Captain," she said in that same, soothing tone, "but I'm sure Her Majesty's Resident Commissioner will be able to provide any assistance you require. In the meantime, we're a little too busy to stop. Good-bye, Captain."
She switched off the com, killing the lieutenant's protest in mid splutter, and leaned back in her chair.
"My, that was a little sloppy of me, wa
sn't it?" she murmured.
Her crew gawked at her for just a second, and then a chorus of relieved laughter ran around the bridge. She smiled, but when she looked up at McKeon, his face was grim, and there was no humor in his eyes.
"You stopped the courier, Skipper," he said quietly, under cover of the others' laughter, "but what about the freighter?"
"I'll stop her, too," Honor said. "Any way I have to."
"But why, Ma'am? You said you understood what's going on, but I'll be damned if I do!"
"Sirius's departure was the last piece I needed." Honor spoke so softly he had to lean forward to hear her. "I know where she's going, you see."
"What?!" McKeon started, then grabbed for his self-control and looked around the bridge. A dozen pairs of eyes were locked on him and his captain, but they whipped back to their own instruments under the impact of his fiery gray glare. Then he returned his own questioning gaze to Honor.
"Somewhere out here, Alistair, probably within only a few hours' hyper flight, there's a Havenite battle squadron. Maybe even a full task force. Sirius is headed for a rendezvous with them."
McKeon's face went white, and his eyes widened.
"It's the only answer that makes sense," she said. "The drugs and guns on the planet were intended to produce a native attack on the enclaves. It was supposed to come as a complete surprise and produce a bloodbath as the Medusans slaughtered off-worlders right and left—including, as you yourself pointed out, their own merchant factors in those northern trade enclaves. In fact," she spoke more slowly, lips tightening and eyes hardening in sudden surmise, "I'll lay odds Sirius is officially assigned to one of those enclaves by the Havenite government." She nodded to herself. "That would make this just about perfect, wouldn't it?"
"How, Ma'am?" McKeon was out of his depth, and he knew it.
"They're trying a coup de main to seize the planet," Honor said flatly. "Sirius's master is 'fleeing in panic' from the native insurrection. In the course of his flight, he'll 'just happen' to encounter a Peep squadron or task force in the area on 'routine maneuvers.' Naturally, he'll spill out his story to the Havenite commander, who, horrified and overcome with a sense of urgency and the need to save off-worlder lives, will immediately proceed to Medusa with his entire force to put down the native uprising." She stared into McKeon's eyes and saw the dawning understanding.
"And once he's done that," she finished very softly, "he'll proclaim Haven's possession of the entire system on the grounds that Manticore has demonstrated its total inability to maintain order and public safety on the planet's surface."
"That's insane," McKeon whispered, but his tone was that of a man trying to convince himself, not truly a protest. "They know we'd never stand for it!"
"Do they?"
"They must! And the entire Home Fleet's only a single wormhole transit away, Skipper!"
"They may believe they can get away with it." Honor's voice was cool and dispassionate; her thoughts were neither. "There's always been a certain anti-annexation movement in Parliament. Maybe they think enough bloodshed on Medusa, coupled with their presence here, will finally give that movement the strength to succeed."
"Not in a million years," McKeon growled.
"Probably not, no. But they're looking in from the outside. They may not realize how little chance of it there is, and maybe they figure they can pull it off however Parliament's xenophobes react. If this had worked the way they planned—assuming I'm right about their intentions—we'd have had no prior reason to suspect their involvement. Under the circumstances, any ship on the picket here probably would have been too busy reacting to the dirt-side situation from a cold start to worry about Sirius's departure. We might not even have noticed it, in which case she'd have slipped away to alert their task force, or whatever, and bring it back in without anyone on our side even suspecting they were coming until they actually arrived. If that had happened, their forces would have been in Basilisk before Home Fleet could even start to react."
She paused and began punching numbers into her maneuvering systems with an unaccustomed speed and accuracy that amazed McKeon. The results flashed on her screen, and she pointed at them.
"Look. If they pop out of hyper right at the hyper limit on a reciprocal of Sirius's present course, they'll be barely twelve light-minutes out from Medusa. If they translate downward at the maximum safe velocity, they can be into planetary orbit in under three and a half hours, even at superdreadnought acceleration rates. They'll also be just over eleven-point-three light-hours from the terminus, so they can reach it in twenty-eight hours and forty-five minutes. If we didn't know they were coming until they dropped out of hyper, they'd have plenty of time to be set up right on the terminus when Home Fleet tried to make transit through it."
McKeon paled. "That would be an act of war," he protested.
"So is that." Honor jabbed a thumb in the general direction of Medusa. "But what's happening dirt-side would only be an act of war if we knew who'd done it, and they've done their level best to convince us it was Manticoran criminals who supplied the guns and drugs. By the same token, their interdiction of the terminus would only turn into an act of war if we tried to transit and they fired on us. If I'm right about their plan, they can't have their entire fleet waiting around out here. For that matter, if they did have their entire fleet out here and they were really ready to fight, they wouldn't need any pretexts. They'd just come crashing in and sit on the terminus, and that would be that. But if they've only got a battle squadron or two, then, yes, we could kick them out of the system even if they were waiting for us. Our losses would be brutal, but theirs would be virtually one hundred percent, and they have to know that."
"Then what in God's name do they think they're doing?"
"I think they're running a bluff," Honor said quietly. "They hope we won't push it and risk engaging them if they're in a position to hurt us badly enough—that we'll stop to negotiate and discover public opinion back home won't stand for heavy casualties to take back a system the anti-annexationists don't want anyway. But if it is a bluff, that's another reason to use a relatively small force. They can always disavow the actions of their commander on the spot, claim he was carried away by understandable concern for off-worlders in the wake of the Medusa Massacre but that he exceeded his authority. That leaves them a way to back out and save face, especially if no one knows they caused the massacres. But think about it, Alistair. Events on Medusa are really just a side show. A pretext. They're not after the planet; they're after control of a second Junction terminus. Even if there's only one chance in fifty that they could pull it off, wouldn't the potential prize be worth the risk from their viewpoint?"
"Yes." There was no more doubt in McKeon's voice, and his nod was grim.
"But I may be wrong about the size of their force or how willing they'll be to fight," Honor said. "After all, their fleet's bigger than ours. They can stand the loss of a couple of battle squadrons as the opening round in a war, especially if they can inflict a favorable rate of exchange in return. And it's going to be a horse race to get anything here from Manticore in time to stop them, even with our Code Zulu. Our message will take thirteen and a half hours to reach Fleet HQ, but Sirius can be into hyper in two hours and fifty minutes—call it three. Let's say they reach their rendezvous three hours after that. Assuming a Fleet acceleration of four-twenty gees, that means their units could be back here in as little as twelve hours and on the warp point in forty-one, which leaves HQ just twenty-seven and a half hours from receipt of our Code Zulu to cover the terminus. Assuming Admiral Webster reacts instantly and dispatches Home Fleet from Manticore orbit with no delay at all, that'll take them—" She punched more numbers into her maneuvering plot, but McKeon was already ahead of her.
"Call it thirty-four hours for superdreadnoughts, or thirty-point-five if they don't send anything heavier than a battlecruiser," he muttered, jaws clenched, and Honor nodded.
"So if they are prepared to fight, they'd have over
three hours to deploy energy mines on the terminus and take up the most advantageous positions before Home Fleet can possibly arrive. Which means the only way to be sure we don't wind up with a major fleet engagement is to stop Sirius from reaching her rendezvous."
"How do you plan to stop her, Ma'am?"
"We're still in Manticoran space, and what's happening on Medusa certainly constitutes an 'emergency situation.' Under the circumstances, I have the authority to order any ship to heave to for examination."
"You know Haven doesn't accept that interpretation of interstellar law, Ma'am." McKeon's voice was low, and Honor nodded. For centuries, Haven had championed the legal claim that the right of examination meant no more than the right to interrogate a ship by signal unless it intended to touch or had, since its last inspection, in fact touched the territory of the star system in which the examination was demanded. Since turning expansionist, the Republic had changed its position (within its own sphere) to the one most of the rest of the galaxy accepted: that the right of examination meant the right to physically stop and search a suspect ship within the examiner's territorial space regardless of its past or intended movements. But Haven had not accepted that interpretation in other star nations' territory. In time, they would have no choice but to do so, since the double standard they claimed was so irritating to the rest of the galaxy (including the Solarian League, which had all sorts of ways to retaliate short of war), but they hadn't yet, and that meant Sirius's master might very well assert Haven's old, traditional interpretation and refuse to stop when called upon to do so.
"If he won't stop willingly, then I'll stop him by force," she said. McKeon looked at her in silence, and she returned his gaze levelly. "If Haven can disavow the actions of an admiral or vice admiral, Her Majesty can disavow those of a commander," she pointed out in that same quiet voice.
McKeon stood looking at her a moment longer, then nodded. She didn't have to mention the next logical step in the process, for he knew it as well as she did. A flag officer could survive being officially disavowed; a commander could not. If Honor fired into Sirius and provoked an interstellar incident which left Queen Elizabeth no choice but to disavow her actions, then Honor's career was over.